Choosing a Course

When you head down to the seaside, where do you play? On the sand and the rocks, or in the ocean? That's pretty much the choice you are making with earth and marine sciences - between geology and the ocean sciences. So think long and hard about what it is you want to study and how you want to use that knowledge and experience in the future.

Once you've done that, you're back to checking out the basics - how the subject is taught, for example. There will be a certain amount of lecturing to listen to, but how much practical work? How many field trips? Some courses can be stretched to four years to provide an instant masters (MSc), while others can be that long in order to incorporate a year of foreign study. Fancy a year of tectonics on the San Andreas fault in California?

Some courses also offer work placement, which may be especially useful if you're planning to move into a particular industry (oil, for example) after-wards, so check whether that is possible and, if so, what links the university has with the private sector.

As with all multidisciplinary courses, check the related departments. It's not a hard and fast rule, but if, for example, you want to specialise in the chemistry of the sea, a healthy chemistry department is more than handy - you will, as likely as not, be sharing facilities and teaching staff.

And it may be a science looking at evidence that might be billions of years old, but it still has a cutting edge in research terms. If that is what interests you look at who will be teaching you and what their specialisations are - if you're taught by someone at the leading edge of the research, you'll feel right on top of the game, although you'll also need to factor in whether all that research means they will be too busy to teach. When you make your trip to the open day, try to ask whether that heroic figure you long to learn from will actually have time to be teaching, but try not to be too impertinent about it.